Prince Hall

Prince Hall was born around 1735, most likely as an enslaved man in the household of William Hall of Boston. He was manumitted in 1770 — five years before the American Revolution — and worked as a leather-dresser, soap-boiler, and small property-owner in Boston for the rest of his life.

He petitioned the Massachusetts General Court in January 1777, alongside seven other free Black men, for the abolition of slavery in the commonwealth — among the first organized abolitionist petitions in any American colony. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled slavery unconstitutional under the state's 1780 constitution in Commonwealth v. Jennison (1783); the petition Hall co-organized was part of the agitation that produced the case.

On the sixth of March 1775 — three months before the Battles of Lexington and Concord — Hall and fourteen other free Black men of Boston were initiated into Freemasonry by a British military lodge attached to the 38th Foot. The American lodges of Massachusetts refused to recognize African Lodge No. 1 after the British departure; Hall obtained a charter directly from the Grand Lodge of England in 1784, formally constituting African Lodge No. 459 — the first Masonic lodge of African American membership in any country and the founding lodge of what became Prince Hall Freemasonry.

He petitioned the Massachusetts legislature in 1787 for funded emigration to Africa for free Black families — among the earliest organized repatriation proposals in American history. He died in Boston on the fourth of December 1807, age approximately seventy-two.

Prince Hall Freemasonry has remained the principal Black fraternal organization in the United States for over two centuries.

He is honored here as the founder of Black Freemasonry and an early organizer of post-Revolutionary Black Boston.